Happy Families_ Stories - Carlos Fuentes [108]
Your idea of the boy distracted by his physical deformity, you hadn’t noticed the classic beauty of his face. Now you know why. Sandokán is identical to his mother, your Nica wife Cielo de la Mora. The jet-black hair. The transparent white skin. Even the birthmark beside his mouth.
Naturally, you didn’t want to find your wife in your son. The young man had never seen a photograph of his mother. The only woman he had seen up close was the sour Sagrario. He can’t compare—and if he knew, if he knew that his mother had reappeared in the living portrait of her son, would Sandokán be more lovable, more understanding with the papa who had come home without a cent, my boy, because I threw it all away on tramps and traveling, on the great spree of my life, dammit, even on Sagrario’s salary, I didn’t know how to save, I didn’t know how to invest, for me there was no tomorrow.
“Because there was the moment of your pictures, Father, there time doesn’t pass, there you never grow old.”
You attribute this to your son. You think that if what you think he thinks is true, your son has seen your movies, it isn’t Sagrario’s pious lie.
“Yes, Sagrario took me to see you whenever you were showing.” Sandokán laughed. “I never thought I’d know you in person.”
“But I’ve come a few times, son.”
“Always in disguise. Not now. Now I see you for the first time. I don’t know”—he stopped smiling—“if I prefer the truth to the lie.”
At that moment you decide you are not going to surrender, Alejandro. Something new in you—abandoning the play, leaving representation behind—sprang up in you unexpectedly, guiding you in an imperfect way toward your son’s personality, which was the path of affection. And for you this was a huge, joyful revelation.
“Know something, Papa? I had a dream that I’d escape, run away from the house. But I couldn’t do it alone. Then . . . look . . . open . . .”
He indicated a suitcase under his bed. You opened it. It was filled with postcards.
“I asked Sagrario to find me cards from everywhere. She knows a lot of strange people. Look. Istanbul, Paris, Rio de Janeiro . . .”
He smiled in satisfaction. “I’ve been everywhere, Papa, and besides . . .”
He sat down in front of a lectern. A volume lay open on it. Sandokán pressed a pedal, and the pages moved.
“ ‘On February 24, 1813, the lookout in the port of Marseille announced the arrival of the Faraón, proceeding from Smyrna, Trieste, and Naples . . .’ ”
He looked at you. “You see? I’ve been to the same places you have. Except the book is earlier than the movie. I beat you!”
Sometimes Sandokán isn’t lovable. He tries to hurt you.
“What have you given me, Papa? What do you want me to give to you? How are you going to pay me for being abandoned? Just tell me that.”
“Don’t repeat my dialogues,” you say irritably.
“Seriously, Father, do you understand? You had everything, I’ve had nothing.”
The boy says this with a wooden face.
At other times you’re busy doing what you have never done. You cook. You keep the house clean. You pretend this is another role, just as if you were—it might have happened—the headwaiter at a restaurant.
Sandokán interrupts. You tell him to let you work. He turns his back.
“Whenever I want to tell you something that matters to me, you say you’re in a hurry.”
Where have you heard that same complaint before?
Your son wants to join you, aggressively. He falls flat on his face. You run to help him. He resists. He struggles with you. In the end he embraces you. You embrace each other.
“You ought to be dead,” the son tells the father, and you refrain from repeating the phrase because it compromises Cielo, your wife, Sandokán’s mother, who also tried to kill her son in the cradle before she fled.
“Have pity on me,” you say instead to your son,